SEARCHENGINES
Google Says Fluff Content Makes It Hard For Search Engines To Understand

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff content, it makes “it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say.”
The truth is, it seems like not only does Google crawl and index content fluff, but the search engine seems to prefer to rank content with a lot of fluff.
As you can imagine, that got some funny responses – because you and I know, Google prefers to rank content that is fluffier, even though its featured snippets just get to the point.
Let me share the context:
yes! this. almost every SEO audit I see that was previously done for a company is calling out random sentences or paragraphs and warning of “duplicate content penalties”
It’s sad.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) January 7, 2022
And yet individual cases exist where duplicate content does harm sites. Thinning it out, consolidating and similar actions have been proven to significantly boost crawl efficiency, indexing volume, and traffic on sites I’ve audited where it was a problem.
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) January 7, 2022
Here is John’s statement on fluff content to the last post Alan made:
But that’s less about duplicate content, and more about fluff. If you make it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say, it’s no wonder they don’t recommend your pages for that.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
Now, I love Ryan’s response:
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
It is pretty true, not just with recipe content – although, it is the most obvious with recipe content that Google ranks in search.
It is a topic I covered before around word count and quality where I said I hate it “when someone adds a huge amount of fluff to their content – be it written or spoken – in order to fill space. Say what you need to say and get on with it. People have limited time on this planet, one thing we cannot do it give back time lost. So keep things short, to the point.”
There should be something about getting to your point, in your content, in the least amount of words, so that your users can convert faster or get what they need in a more efficient manner.
But until Google stops rewarding fluff – we will continue to produce fluff.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google November 2023 Core Update Fully Rolled Out

After just under 26 days, the Google November 2023 core update is finally done rolling out. It took almost two weeks longer to roll out than the average core update and rolled out during the huge shopping days on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also overlapping the November 2023 reviews update. So it was a big deal.
Google posted the update was done at 11:32 am ET on November 28, 2023, after it started rolling out on November 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM ET.
This is the longest documented core update rollout, the previous longest core update rollout went to the August 2023 core update took 16 days, this one was 10 days longer. It wasn’t as long as most SEOs thought it would take, but it was the longest rollout of a core update. It was not the longest update in general, the December 2022 helpful content update took 38 days to roll out but it was the longest core update roll out in history.
As a reminder, the October 2023 core update started on October 5, 2023 and completed on October 19, 2023, completing two weeks prior to this November core update rolled out.
Here are the posts on the release times:
The roll-out of the November core update is now complete.https://t.co/geIJA2Bg8g
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 28, 2023
Documented Volatility For November 2023 Core Update
This update kicked off quickly and was super volatile early on. The chatter within the SEO community was pretty heated throughout – even during the Thanksgiving holiday break. The tools themselves seemed to calm down, even with the reviews update rolling out the following week.
There was some additional chatter in the past 24 hours about massive volatility but the tools are not picking that up and the chatter was not that insane.
The tools themselves shows volatility from November 2nd through November 17th or so. More on that later.
Google November 2023 Core Update Quick Facts:
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google November 2023 Broad Core Update
- Launched: November 2, 2023 at around 3 pm ET
- Rollout: Finished on November 28, 2023 at around 11:30 am ET
- Targets: It looks at all types of content
- Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
- Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
- Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
Overlapping Updates: November Core & November Reviews Updates
Unlike with the October core update, we had the October 2023 spam update roll out, where Google said if you are not spamming then you weren’t hit by the spam update, you were hit by the core update.
With a reviews update and a core update, that is a bit harder for Google to say. They are similar updates that can impact similar sites. So there was for sure some confusion between the two. It would be hard to know for sure if your site was hit by the November core update versus the November reviews update unless your site got hit in the first batch of the core update volatility before the reviews update touched down.
Google Tracking Tools On November 2023 Core Update:
Here is what the tools showed over the past month or so with this core and reviews update rollout:
Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):
Previous Broad Core Updates
Here is a list of the most recent core updates we’ve seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.
- November 2023 Core Update: November 2, 2023 through November 28, 2023
- October 2023 Core Update: October 5, 2023 through October 19, 2023
- August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
- March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
- September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
- May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
- November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
- July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
- June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
- December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
- May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
- January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
- September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
- Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019
How did you all do? Hope it wasn’t too bad?
Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Bing Chat / Microsoft Copilot Balanced Mode Used 70% Of The Time With Creative & Precise Mode At 15% Each

Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft shared how often the different modes in Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, are used. There is Balanced mode, creative mode and precise mode. Balanced mode gets 60-70% of the usages, whereas the other two modes get about 15% each.
Mikhail wrote on X, “Balanced is the most popular, maybe 60-70% of the people (it is the fastest and the default). Creative and Precise are 15%-ish each.”
Here are those posts:
I thought creative mode would get more usage than precise mode because of the image generation aspect but I guess I was wrong.
To learn more about these chat modes, read this story.
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Most SEOs Believe Google’s November Core & Reviews Updates Will Complete In December

The Google November 2023 core update and Google November 2023 reviews update are still both rolling out, and we have no estimated time of when they will finish rolling out. Both are well past their estimated two-week rollout period. I ran a poll yesterday asking SEOs when they think it will be done, and most said in December and not in the next few days left of November.
The poll had just under 600 votes in 24-hours and 79% said the update will be completed in December and 21% said in the last days remaining in November. I posted the poll on X – here it is:
Will the Google core and reviews update finish in November or December?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 27, 2023
Personally, I thought it would be done by now and I still think it will be done in the next day or so – but I am wrong a lot. 🙂
I do hope it is done today so they can roll out the Christmas holiday update (kidding…).
Forum discussion at X.
Update: I’ll have a story tomorrow but at least one of the updates is done in November:
The roll-out of the November core update is now complete.https://t.co/geIJA2Bg8g
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 28, 2023
-
FACEBOOK5 days ago
Indian Government Warns Facebook, YouTube About Deepfakes, Misinformation Violations
-
MARKETING5 days ago
Whiteboard Friday Recap 2023: AI Edition
-
SOCIAL6 days ago
Meta Stock: Still Room For Upside In A Maturing Market (NASDAQ:META)
-
SOCIAL7 days ago
17-Year-Old Claims To Make 6 Figures A Year
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google Testing “Simple Search” Refinement Option
-
SOCIAL7 days ago
X is Bringing Post Headlines Back to Link Previews In-Stream
-
SOCIAL6 days ago
Instagram Will Now Enable All Users to Download Publicly Posted Reels Clips
-
MARKETING6 days ago
OpenAI: The return of the king
You must be logged in to post a comment Login